But if you do watch your weight, try the Andy Warhol New York City Diet: when I order in a restaurant, I order everything that I don’t want, so I have a lot to play around with while everyone else eats. Then, no matter how chic the restaurant is, I insist that the waiter wrap the entire plate up like a to-go order, and after we leave the restaurant I find a little corner outside in the street to leave the plate in, because there are so many people in New York who live in the streets, with everything they own in shopping bags.

So I lose weight and stay trim, and I think that maybe one of those people will find a Grenouille dinner on the window ledge. But then, you never know, maybe they wouldn’t like what I ordered as much as I didn’t like it, and maybe they’d turn up their noses and look through the garbage for some half-eaten rye bread. You just never know with people. You just never know what they’ll like, what you should do for them.

So that’s the Andy Warhol New York City Diet.

La Grenouille was and is a fancy eatery in Midtown, by the way. If the above passage teaches you anything, it might be “Don’t take diet advice from thin people.” Having said that, however, the intersection of Warhol and food yields some interesting nuggets.

Not terribly surprisingly, Andy Warhol claimed that his only weakness for nostalgia had to do with the old-style automats like Schrafft’s, for which, remarkably, Warhol did a 60-second commercial in 1968 that consisted of a single voluptuous pan over one of Schrafft’s scrumptious chocolate sundaes. That commercial, alas, appears to be lost to the sands of time, but you can watch a 2014 “re-creation” of the commercial here.

Anyway, here’s Warhol on Schrafft’s and Chock Full O’ Nuts:

My favorite restaurant atmosphere has always been the atmosphere of the good, plain, America lunchroom or even the good plain American lunchcounter. The old-style Schrafft’s and the old-style Chock Full O’ Nuts are absolutely the only things in the world that I’m truly nostalgic for. The days were carefree in the 1940s and 1950s when I could go into a Chocks for my cream cheese sandwich with nuts on date-nut bread and not worry about a thing.

A few lines later, Warhol writes, “Progress is very important and exciting in everything except food.” But that didn’t prevent him from proposing an eccentric dining solution for lonesome foodies:

I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called ANDY-MATS—“The Restaurant for the Lonely Person.” You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television.

Incredibly, as the blog Restaurant-ing Through History explains, that ridiculous Andy-Mat idea nearly happened in real life. Below is a picture of Warhol with three associates, architect Araldo Cossutta, developer Geoffrey Leeds, and financier C. Cheever Hardwick III; it appears that the picture was taken at some sort of announcement event for the Andy-Mat, which was to be “an unpretentious neighborhood restaurant serving homely comfort food at reasonable prices which was slated to open in fall of 1977 on Madison Avenue at 74th Street in NYC.”

For anyone who knows New York, Madison and 74th Street is a terrible place to place an “unpretentious neighborhood restaurant” serving food at “reasonable prices.” The plan was to include “pneumatic tubes through which customers’ orders would be whooshed into the kitchen. The meals served in Andy-Mats, in keeping with the times, were to be frozen dinners requiring only reheating.” Hooray, frozen dinners! Unsurprisingly, the restaurants never happened.

You’d have to be a semiotics Ph.D. to uncover all the layers of mendacious allusion and outright theft going on here. If nothing else, it’s a contender for the “Protesting Too Much” Hall of Fame. See, the idea is that if you are eating yummy McGriddles from McDonald’s or delectable Croissan’wiches from Burger King for breakfast, you’re a brainwashed drone who needs to be liberated by ... an A.M. Crunchwrap from Taco Bell (which admittedly also sounds yummy). Yes, you read that right: a delicious Croissan’wich and you’re a soulless drone; a delicious A.M. Crunchwrap and you’re a hipsterish free spirit with the ability to cavort in the streets of Prague, perhaps and eventually open an artisanal and/or steampunk moustache wax boutique (I have nothing against hipsters, I’m just reading into the ad). Never mind that the most powerful electron microscope on earth wouldn’t be able to detect any ideological difference between a McGriddle and an A.M. Crunchwrap.

Sticking with the Orwell tip, the commercial repurposes the “four legs good, two legs bad” formulation of Animal Farm into the totalitarian regime’s “circle = good, hexagon = bad.” I could hardly write that with a straight face, it’s so stupid. So that’s right, fealty to a round shape is bad but the one with the six equal sides is good. The ad’s Winston Smith finds his Julia as they wait on line for their Victory Gin, er, a round breakfast sandwich, lock eyes, and escape together to the land of Borat-ish un-corporate-ness. Just to make sure you don’t miss the point, the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” kicks in at the moment of maximum individualism. Because it takes an individual to appreciate the world’s most universally beloved punk band, right?

Oh yeah, the clowns, I almost forgot. All the authority figures in “Oceania” or whatever have clown makeup on. Because McDonald’s corporate logo is a guy in a clown suit and you know, fuck that guy.

One touch I did like is that the evil kingdom is surrounded by a moat that is actually a drab ball pit, which is mostly associated with McDonald’s Playland. Of course, trying to demonize a wonderful, fun ball pit for children has to rank down there with the worst things any advertiser has ever done, but you know, all’s fair in love and breakfast war.

Here’s a whimsical and marvelously impractical plateware idea from Kahla at 5.5 Design Studio: plates designed to fit specific meals. The idea is that you can plan out your week this way, with “Daily Menu Plates” for breaded fish, a chicken leg, a single sausage, and so on.

The drawback of the plan becomes apparent when you try to consider what happens in week 2, of course. Equally obviously, flat plates designed to hold a hamburger will hold a lobster roll equally well.

“Daily Menu” is a collection of biomorphic plates that plays with these clichés and accompanies us throughout the week. These plates function as recipe cards to suggest meal ideas when lack of inspiration strikes. Each day has its plate and each dish his plate!

Plates are a pretty ingenious feat of design—a largely flat surface for solid foods, with the perimeter curled upward, ever-so-slightly, so as to contain any wily or runny food as you chow down. It’s a simple, yet elegant, way to dine, but somehow there is this absurd foodie trend of eschewing the noble plate in favor of… basically everything that is not a fucking plate. These are not restaurants I patronize, mind you, these are restaurants I boycott, because while I can appreciate creative culinary presentation, I refuse to eat anywhere that appears to value flash over utility, and apparently I am not alone in just wanting my fucking food served on a fucking plate. This is nowhere close to being “too much to ask for.” A plate???

Enter the noble citizens of We Want Plates, a heroic organization “Crusading against food being served on bits of wood and roof tiles. Chips in little buckets, peas in flowerpots and jam-jar drinks can do one too.” You can join them on Twitter and Facebook, where they publicize the most egregious offenders in hope of shaming them back to their senses. Foodie novelty must be stopped!

Butter… served on a pebble.

Just paper on a plank—not even a little novelty value to compensate for the fact that you egg yolk is about to run any which way.

Forget about those anonymous “glitterbomb” envelopes—so last year—Dicks By Mail is the new kid in town with edible dicks in a bag. They’ll send a bag of dicks to anyone you want ‘em to.

For a mere $15 the company will send an anonymous bag of phallic-shaped gummy candies to your enemy with a note that reads “Eat a bag of dicks.”

It’s simple. It’s easy.

According to their FAQ section:

Who should I send a bag of dicks to?

It’s been said that people, on average, are able to keep a close network of about 250 people in their lives. I recommend all of them. However, the top 10 list of people to send a bags of dicks to are…is?...are;

Finnish food behemoth Kesko has been ordered by its government to stop telling the public that their crappy meatballs have any actual meat in them. The manufacturers have been advertising that their meatball-like product is high in meat, which an investigation has proven false.

According to a story on Finnish news service Yle, Kesko has to rename their product “pyöryköitä” (“balls” in English) after a probe “revealed that it contained only machine-recovered meat, essentially scraps, which are not defined as meat…”

A rep for Kesko stated that the scrappy balls “have the equivalent of 52 percent meat. However according to current legislation, they aren’t those parts of the animal that can be described as meat.”

Despite the sledgehammers, chainsaws and occasional police-instigated violence that became heavily associated with Plasmatics’ shows, the late, great Wendy O. Williams was first and foremost a gentle soul, with more than a touch of hippie influence. As a teenage runaway she bounced around the Rocky Mountains and sold crafts, moved to Florida to be a lifeguard and even cooked at a health food restaurant in London before making the stage her home.

Wendy was also an advocate for animal welfare and a vocal vegetarian. One might understandably assume that her dietary choices were entirely ethically motivated, but this 1984 interview from Vegetarian Times (see her as the adorable cover girl above) shows she was also incredibly health-conscious—a serious urban gardener who avoided drugs and alcohol, exercised regularly and sprouted her own macrobiotic diet from a Tribeca loft. Williams actually taught a macrobiotic cooking class at the Learning Annex!

The best part? The article includes Williams’ own super-hippie recipe for salad dressing—it actually sounds like a pretty intriguing flavor profile too. Save it for your next Plasmatics themed dinner party!

Wendy’s diet is very heavy on live foods and sprouts. The salad dressing is the result of experimentation in the blender and it’s rather unique in that it includes fresh greens chopped up into the dressing. She advises that its [sic] best to use two different types of greens; one for the dressing, one for the salad.

This is totally amazing. Ronit Baranga is a ceramic sculptor from Israel, and she has come up with a set of tableware that will automatically call up images of Fester, Lurch, Wednesday, the Thing, and the rest of the Addams clan. Her website is a total trip, and I look forward to seeing more of her creations in the future.

Baranga’s high-minded comment on her anthropomorphic set runs like this:

The useful, passive, tableware can now be perceived as an active object, aware of itself and its surroundings – responding to it. It does not allow to be taken for granted, to be used. It decides on its own how to behave in the situation.

When regular household items become “active objects,” that’s usually what we call haunting, or possibly something like a Nest Learning Thermostat—either way, I won’t get too worried until one of these pieces actually starts nibbling at my lips or walking towards me!

If you haven’t already lost your appetite, there’s more after the jump…